


light, shining

by Dizibell



Category: Divergent (Movies), Divergent Series - Veronica Roth
Genre: F/M, Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-11-09 04:25:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11096856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dizibell/pseuds/Dizibell
Summary: So I wrote this years ago, in the notes app of my old phone and decided I might as well post it. Just your basic fix-it for the ending of Allegiant. My first time posting anything here, since I used to be more of a fanfiction.net girl.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Text in bold is direct quotation from Veronica Roth's Allegiant.

**I twist and lunge toward the device. The gun goes off and pain races through my body. I don't even know where the bullet hit me.**

**I can still hear Caleb repeating the code for Matthew. With a quaking hand I type in the numbers on the keypad.**

**The gun goes off again.**

**More pain, and black edges on my vision, but I hear Caleb's voice speaking again. The green button.**

**So much pain.**

**But how, when my body feels so numb?**

**I start to fall, and slam my hand into the keypad on my way down. A light turns on behind the green button.**

**I hear a beep, and a churning sound.**

**I slide to the floor. I feel something warm on my neck, and under my cheek. Red. Blood is a strange color. Dark.**

**From the corner of my eye, I see David slumped over in his chair.**

**And my mother walking out from behind him.**

**She is dressed in the same clothes she wore the last time I saw her, Abnegation gray, stained with her blood, with bare arms to show her tattoo. There are still bullet holes in her shirt; through them I can see her wounded skin, red but no longer bleeding, like she's frozen in time. Her dull blond hair is tied back in a knot, but a few loose strands frame her face in gold.**

**I know she can't be alive, but I don't know if I'm seeing her now because I'm delirious from the blood loss or if the death serum has addled my thoughts or if she is here in some other way.**

**She kneels next to me and touches a cool hand to my cheek.**

**"Hello, Beatrice," she says, and she smiles.**

**"Am I done yet?" I say, and I'm not sure if I actually say it or if I just think it and she hears it.**

**"Yes," she says, her eyes bright with tears. "My dear child, you've done so well."**

**"What about the others?" I choke on a sob as the image of Tobias comes into my mind, of how dark and how still his eyes were, how strong and warm his hand was, when we first stood face-to-face. "Tobias, Caleb, my friends?"**

**"They'll care for each other," she says. "That's what people do."**

My mother's eyes are soft, kind and I believe her words - but they're not enough. I want them to be. I want to accept that I've played my part and done well, I want to smile and close my eyes and slip away from the pain into my mother's arms.

But.

I've learned a lot about sacrifice since I chose Dauntless. Strangely, I've learned more about sacrifice in these past months than I ever learned in Abnegation, the faction of the selfless. I've learned that the only sacrifices worth making are those made in love. There's no question in my mind that dying here and now on this cold floor would be an act of love. Yet I'm still not sure I'm ready for it.

The pain, harsh, red and real, anchors me to the earth. It's holding me back from the forgiving light of my mother's embrace, but it's not all that's holding me down. There's good here too. I want to hear Christina laugh again, I want the time to truly find forgiveness in my heart for Caleb, I want to go home to the city and see it heal after all that has happened. More than anything, I want to see dark blue eyes shining with love again.

I want to live.

I look up at my mother, knowing she sees my decision. Her expression is a myriad of things. Unshed tears are starting to spill from the corners of her eyes and her mouth is twisted into something that is almost a smile. Her face is lit with grief and sorrow, but beyond that, I can make out her happiness.

My mother wants me to live, too. Even if she misses me. Even if I miss her. My life is not done yet, and anyway, this isn't a goodbye so much as a goodbye for now. That embrace is still waiting for me when I am ready for it.

She reaches out a hand and brushes my hair back gently. She presses her warm lips to my forehead.

"Be brave." She says, in lieu of farewell. Then she's gone and I'm drifting into darkness, not the darkness of the death serum, but the familiar, comforting darkness of sleep.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**I have always hated the emptiness that winter brings, the blank landscape and the stark difference between sky and ground, the way it transforms trees into skeletons and the city into a wasteland. Maybe this winter I can be persuaded otherwise.**

**We drive past the fences and stop by the front doors, which are no longer manned by guards. We get out, and Zeke seizes his mother's hand to steady her as she shuffles through the snow. As we walk into the compound, I know for a fact that Caleb succeeded, because there is no one in sight. That can only mean that they have been reset, their memories forever altered.**

**"Where is everyone?" Amar says.**

**We walk through the abandoned security checkpoint without stopping. On the other side, I see Cara. The side of her face is badly bruised, and there's a bandage on her head, but that's not what concerns me. What concerns me is the troubled look on her face.**

**"What is it?" I say.**

**Cara shakes her head.**

**"Where's Tris?" I say.**

"She..." Cara wets her lips and swallows, nervousness and sympathy mingling on her face. Suddenly I'm afraid, more afraid than I've ever been in my life, more afraid than I've been in all the times I've done the simulation.

"Tris went into the Weapons Lab instead of Caleb," Cara says. "She survived the death serum, and set off the memory serum, but she . . . she was shot."

Because this is not a simulation. This is one of my fears, one of the four, coming to life in front of me and there's nothing I can do.

"She's in the hospital now. In the bed beside Uriah. She's hasn't woken up yet and they don't...they don't know why, because she has multiple bullet wounds but nothing important was hit, so she should be awake by now but she isn't. They keep talking about trauma, but I don't think they really..."

Cara babbles, words streaming from her at desperate speed. Her voice seems dull and distant to me. It's a moment before the sense behind her rambling pierces the wall of fear I've erected around my mind, but when it does, I take my first breath in what feels like hours.

Tris went into the Weapons Lab instead of Caleb.

Tris was shot.

Tris is in the hospital.

Tris is alive.

The relief that shoots through me nearly makes my knees buckle. I was wrong. This isn't one of the four. Injured Tris, I can cope with. As long as she's alive.

"I'm going to the hospital," I say, just to interrupt Cara, who is still talking. No one objects, not that I expected them to. Christina raises her head and looks at me.

"I'll come too."

I nod and she follows me to Tris.

 


	3. Chapter 3

Tris sleeps restlessly. Her eyes dart wildly behind her closed lids and she thrashes, tugging on the tubes and wires that are attached all over her body. Her colour is high, her cheeks flushed. She seems so close to the boundary between sleeping and waking, like you could wake her with only a touch.

You can't. I've been trying for hours. Talking to her, clinging to her, shaking her, begging her to wake up and let me hear her voice, let me see her stubborn, beautiful eyes. Christina stayed for a while but she left when my pleas became too personal. Normally I would have been surprised. The former Candor isn't easily discomfited.

Caleb comes in after she leaves and hovers awkwardly by the end of the bed. His expression shifts, between guilt and misery - self-pity. It makes me want to hit him, repeatedly. Tris nearly died in his place and he's standing by the end of her bed, drowning in self-pity.

If he wasn't her brother, I'd really hit him. If she hadn't nearly given her life for his, I'd want to kill him. As things are, I hold her hand to keep me calm and settle for shooting him seething glares every other second.

He leaves not long after he arrives. I'm glad of that. There are things I have to say to him, questions I have to ask, but I'll deal with that later, when I'm sure I can talk to him without screaming. When Tris is awake.

I'm still wearing the clothes I came back from the city in. I should...there are things, I know, that I have to do. There are people waiting, responsibilities, things still left to be done. But none of that seems real to me. Nothing seems real, except this room, this bed and the girl lying in it. The girl who hasn't yet come back to me.

I have to believe she will.

 


	4. Chapter 4

I think I'm dreaming.

I don't know where I am, or how I got here. I don't know why I'm here. I don't even know what's happening. The world reshapes itself, shifting around me, twisting just as I start to recognise it.

I don't understand. Where is my mother? Wasn't she with me? Why did she leave?

On the table in front of me are two baskets. In one is a hunk of cheese, and in the other, a knife the length of my forearm.

I've seen this before.

"Choose." A voice says behind me, and without deciding anything, I seize the knife, turn and hurl it at Jeanine.

It lodges in her throat and her eyes widen. She staggers backwards. The world dissolves around her and takes her with it.

My father looks down on me, looming out of shadow. He's not that much taller than me. He's not -

Alive?

"Selfish," he tells me, red-faced and spitting with rage. "Traitor. Selfish, selfish, selfish."

Am I dead?

"Dauntless," he accuses me.

He's wrong. Isn't he? I can't remember. I can't remember anything and I'm falling now, anyway, and my father has gone the same way as Jeanine. I'm alone again, swallowed up by this endless black, pulled under and drowned, blind and afraid.

I want my mother. I want what she held out - warmth and the comfort of home, that soft place, that safe place. Why would I choose this? This place is dark and cold and empty. This isn't what I chose. I chose hope. I chose love.

I chose Tobias. The thought of his name is like a shot of adrenaline, enough to make my heart blaze into beating. I fight against the urge to keep falling, slip softly into the quiet dark. There's light, I know there is. I kick and I struggle and I scream for Tobias and Christina and Caleb and myself.

The darkness changes from utter black to the grey blanket of unconsciousness. Light bleeds through. Light, blaring and red-tinted through my eyelids. And noise, too, mechanical chimes and bleeping, and the low murmur of voices, like the sound of a river. I let it wash over me, making no effort to comprehend the words.

"Tris."

A hand on my hand, warm and strong. Gripping too tight, but I don't mind. I grip back tighter.

"Tobias," I croak. It hurts to speak. I squeeze his hand again.

"Tris," Tobias chokes out. That one small word is a whole prayer of thanks.

I force my eyes open, squinting through the light. I turn my head. There, looking down at me, blurry with unshed tears and beautiful. Dark blue eyes, shining with love.

 


End file.
